The confrontation between Antifa Sacramento and the Traditionalist Youth Network /Traditionalist Workers Party and other Nazi and KKK groups hit a heated point today with reports saying at least five people were stabbed and dozens injured. The rally by Trad Youth was intended to protest “globalization” and multiculturalism, and was emboldened by the recent Brexit vote and the meteoric rise of Donald Trump. Trad Youth is the organizing project of well-known white nationalist Matthew Heimbach, who attempts to link up the young Alt Right with the more established groups on the radical racist fringe.
Their event was intended to be at the California capitol building in Sacramento, with Antifa stepping up to confront the event right away. The elected officials inside decided to retreat into the basement of the building for fear of confrontation, and at 11:45 9-11 was called for the first time with injuries that would need hospital transport. Bricks were throne, baseball bats flew, and fists were in the air as a roaming street battle ensued. Police came in “riot gear” to disperse the crowd, using “less lethal” weapons on protesters engaged in confrontations with Trad Youth organizers.
The event escalated when the nationalist side stabbed anti-fascist protesters, including an elderly woman who was posing no threat. Six anti-fascist protesters were stabbed by the fascist block, a show unimaginable cruelty from a group of neo-Nazis who knew they were on the losing side.
Trad Youth and their contingent were radically outnumbered by the anti-fascists who came en masse, sending the message that Sacramento would not be a safe haven to the extremism that they represent. They were only able to amass a little over 20 in their contingent, a group that was chased out with force by the anti-fascist crowd.
As video shows, the confrontation itself opened into a “brawl” as open confrontation between anti-fascists and the Nazis took the form of street warfare. This is one of the most volatile confrontations in years, eclipsing the recent KKK rally in Southern California and the protest actions threatening to shut down Donald Trump appearances in the Southwest and West Coast. As usual, police were mainly there to protect the Nazi contingent that was growing fearful of the growing anti-racist presence that was surrounding them.
We are compiling some of the videos that people took from the action below so you can get a sense of what happened and what the militant confrontation took shape as.
One of the key ways the Alt Right attempts to make its way into the culture is by sliding itself into casual discourse by normalizing racist jokes that have a very serious fascist undercurrent. This was exactly the intent with the Coincidence Detector, the Google Chrome-Plugin that put parenthesis around the last names that they think are Jewish. This “echo” is meant to make people think about all of these Jewish last names and think that is “can’t be a coincidence,” even though they are arbitrarily assigning Jewishness to some names, lumping them into groups, and then assuming some coordinated conspiracy to do a whole range of “degeneracies.”
They have done this largely through their meme culture of slang words and goofy parody songs laced with incredibly offensive racist language. They repeatedly make jokes about “1488,” which is a neo-Nazi meme that they appropriate in a way to make fun of their more “LARPy” ideological counterparts. They have taken their memes a step further in different gifts they give to the donors to their show, starting with the oven mitts. During their run, when a donor gave $14.88 they were sent a Daily Shoah oven mitt. This is supposed to reference the ovens used to incinerate Jewish bodies during the Holocaust, which is a Holocaust they do not believe happened and intend to mock. They use “ovened” in casual conversation as a way to say something deserves to be destroyed, or simply to awkwardly insult something simply for rhyming(such as the “oven middle class” instead of Upper Middle Class).
Their newest attempt at bringing the memes into the community is with their different shirts. Their “standard” shirt, which says Standard Pool Party, is a reference to their “standard pool parties,” which is just their meet-ups for Alt Right fans. Their Fash the Nation shirts were simply to promote their political show, and when the issue came forward with the coincidence Detector they came up with another one. This simply included the triple parenthesis around the world “Coincidence,” which is a coded reference to the “Jewish Question.”
As the story about the Coincidence Detector went viral, people got wise to the t-shirt that was up on their Tee-Spring page and reported it for hate speech. The shirt was promptly pulled down, angering many in the Right Stuff forums and annoying the hosts. The other shirts still stay up, most of which are pretty vague in terms of racial references. Instead, the shirts are more just a reference to the Daily Shoah and, by relationship, to racial nationalism. There are, however, shirts with helicopters, referencing the helicopter murders by Pinochet’s army against dissidents. The 616 Degrees shirt is also a reference to the concentration camp ovens used to incinerate bodies. These would both also violate the Tee-Spring Terms of Service.
That was, however, until the TRS Merch page on Tee-Spring was pulled of all of its shirts. Since Tee-Spring campaigns for shirt sales are temporary, it could just be that their sale ended and will returns soon. This requires keeping an eye out to see if they return.
Since 1990, American Renaissance (AmRen) has been a leader in the “suit and tie” racist crowd that was forming during that period. Preferring a congenial conference atmosphere to a cross burning, Jared Taylor created an institution that would use an academic tone to argue for racial differences in biology and intelligence, against diversity, and for white identity. Though it has become slightly more radical over the years, it has generally been a meeting point for a certain segment of the white nationalist movement that wants to see a level of respectability, and even mainstream crossover, for its ideas.
What it is best known for, even within its small subculture, is the particular focus it has given on largely disproven Race and IQ arguments, building on the work of disgraced and marginalized professors like J. Philippe Rushton, Donald Templar, and Richard Lynn to argue that there is a global “Bell Curve” in intelligence. They then tie in qualities like criminality, sexual restraint, and “time-preference” to this, putting whites near the top just below East Asians (Jews are actually at the top, which takes them to a whole other disgraceful set of accusations.). The notion here is that there is a general racial hierarchy, and that it is gene markers that actually drive much of behavior rather than “nurture,” social systems, or culture. This is not where the mainstream of science is, no matter what branch, and the AmRen crowd seems well aware that they are against the tide.
Over the last couple of years, as the Alt Right has formed, the new intellectual internet culture of white nationalism, AmRen has continued to be one of the primary meeting points for a certain department of the movement (the other leader being the National Policy Institute). Here speakers have shifted somewhat from the pseudoacademic prose that has defined most of its history, and instead political nationalism, identitarianism, and crossover social issues have defined its last couple of hears. Human Biological Diversity, the modern term for Race Realism, has gained them quite a following for Internet hate-mongers, but it hasn’t had the organizing results they had hoped for. While they have pivoted the rhetoric a bit, they still return to race and IQ arguments whenever possible.
The most recent AmRen conference that happened on May 27th was held at Montgomery Bell State Park outside Nashville, Tennessee. It has been housed here the last several years after the conference was shut down by organized pressure on hotel managers. Taylor believed that having it at a government venue would provide them a certain level of protection, and this has proven true, as officials have done what they could to protect the racists gathering inside. This track record is one reason that many in the movement are advocating for using government services more as they believe they do not have the same influence from the public, and therefore anti-fascist organizers cannot get the event shut down. The 2010 and 2011 conferences were both shut down when pressure was put on the hotel, and one speaker at the canceled conference even attempted suing the One People’s Project and other activists in an effort to keep them away from the conference.
The 2016 line-up was a mix of known faces and foreign guests, many of which seemed like surprising choices since the growing Alt Right has provided them with enough domestic celebrities that they wouldn’t need to turn to European nationalists. The choice to include them seems like a very clear ideological choice for Taylor, whose vision of politicizing their meta-politics is to follow European nationalist parties and movements. In recent speeches he has discussed returning to the populist model of people like David Duke, and he was an early supporter of the Donald Trump campaign.
James Edwards
At the Podium
James Edwards made up one of the more well known faces whose toothy-grins make him the kind of “aww schucks” Southern white-nationalist who attempts to “dumb down” AmRen for the more “hometown” racists. He wears his racism on his sleeve, yet, even in this speech, he uses the cover of paleoconservatism to really act as though he simply represents the edge of Old Right traditional American conservatism. Edwards himself is ideologically aligned with the New Right/Alt Right wing that sides with traditionalism, ethno-nationalism, and hard-right anti-equality views. He is on the board for both the American Freedom Party and the Council of Conservative Citizens, which he got a great deal of media heat for after church-shooter Dylan Roof revealed to be a fan of the CofCC. Edwards is not as well traveled on the conference circuit, but he does have more of a reach than many might realize.
While his radio show, the Political Cesspool, has been denounced openly as a white nationalist “go to” spot, he has been able to acquire a number of semi-well known guests from libertarianism and paleoconservatism. This peaked when he welcomed former GOP Presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan, who Edwards volunteered for during his final Presidential run in 1999. Buchanan, for many years, was the furthest edge of the GOP that was still acceptable, and his 1992 campaign was well known for taking many of the strategic points from the David Duke campaign a year before (Duke is also a frequent guest on the Political Cesspool). Buchanan has often argued for a sort of American nationalism, suggesting that America should have stayed out of WWII, postured in favor of segregation, was against affirmative action and about all progressive racial policies, and adamantly opposed to all things queer. The only strange relief from this hard right politic is that he is strangely in favor of animal rights (to a degree), and PETA even awarded his magazine, the American Conservative, an award for an expose they ran on the meat industry. It was Buchanan’s appearance that lent Edwards’ show mainstream credibility, which led Edwards to appearing on major news outlets not only as a speaker for the hard-right, but actually as a commentator in regular debate segments at places like CNN.
James Edwards speaking on CNN as a regular guest discussing politics, where refrain from mentioning he is a white supremacist.
Edwards got even more attention recently when he hosted Anthony Cumia of the radio show Opie and Anthony after Cumia was fired for racially loaded comments on the air. Edwards and Cumia ranted for an hour about the “problems in the black community,” and the only breaks in this discussion were for advertisements for survivalist companies and racist community groups.
Edwards usually sticks to his regular trough of neo-fascist ideologues, which often includes AmRen founder Jared Taylor. His discussion at AmRen 2016 was a familiar story to AmRen crowds: the sacrifices he has made to be a racist, the times he refused to apologize, and the extensive work he has done that should be respected. His rhetoric was noticeably behind much of the rest of the crowd, which is a testament to the fact that his lack of social media skills and well-read mannerisms is starting to push him out of the center of the Alt Right. While he still may be popular with people like the League of the South, the Daily Shoah and the rest of the vulgar Internet trolls are the ones that are defining the movement that lingers at AmRen.
His most recent act of media buffoonery came when the Donald Trump campaign gave him full press credentials and he was allowed to interview the candidate’s son, Donald Trump Jr. The story was picked up in dozens of publications, listing him as a “pro-slavery” radio host. As he went on discussing how many places the incident was mentioned, it became clear that this was an attempt to impress the crowd and prove his relevance. This included bragging about marrying a model and appearing in a reality show.
Fernando Cortes(left) standing with John Friend, racialist and anti-Semitic host of the Realist Report.
Fernando Cortes was a prime speaker who was given extra room, used as an example that AmRen wasn’t just vulgar racism for white people: it was racism for everyone. Cortes is a well-known Mexican nationalist who advocates for a far right politic that is friendly to white nationalism over the border. During the questions and answer session Richard Spencer of the Radix Journal and the National Policy Institute asked what the Mexican nationalist movement thought of American fascists, which led Cortes to gush and promise that it is only American Mexicans who want to “take back” the American Southwest.
He went after NAFTA, sharing a certain critique with left-wing anti-globalization advocates, though his prescription and core ideas are the anti-thesis of the anarchist project.
NAFTA was a deathblow for Mexican farming, since without protection from imports; Mexico cannot even grow its own corn and beans.
He thanked white people for being so generous and kind even though they were under “racial attack.” Cortes is known for his Identitarian Congress that hosted famous anti-Semites and Holocaust Deniers like Ernst Zundel and David Duke. Cortes even appeared on Duke’s radio show, where he again said that American whites were “under attack.”
We [Mexican nationalists] understand the attack and the genocide that is trying to be done with the European and white Americans and we are against it. … The people in the United States, they believe that we want massive immigration, that we think it’s a good thing, that we’re taking advantage. We understand perfectly that it erodes the fabric of your society, that it’s toxic for your nation. It’s also toxic for our nation.
Peter Brimelow
To those outside of the racialist world, the real superstar would have been Peter Brimelow. That name rings a bell for anyone that has followed anti-immigration politics over the last decade. The author of Alien Nation and the founder of VDare, the anti-immigration web magazine, Brimelow has slowly moved from being a beltway conservative writer to an open racialist. He still has a great deal of pool in those edge areas of mainstream conservatism, with people like Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh often crediting his work for informing their views on immigration.
RamZPaul (Paul Ramsy)
RamZPaul did the dinner speech once again, just as he had at the last couple of AmRen conferences. RamZPaul has made a name for himself doing rambling YouTube videos where he tells racist jokes into the camera. His speeches at AmRen are often to explain a right-wing phenomenon, with the last one being “What is the Dark Enlightenment.” This year’s was “What is the Alt Right,” which outlined the main trajectory for the Alt Right starting with paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, Joe Sobran, Samuel Francis and Paul Gottfried. He traced it through the founding of the website Alternative Right by Richard Spencer, who Paul showered with affection. He went through the basic political ideas, the mobilization behind Donald Trump, and the validation by “mainstream” sources like Milo Yiannapoulos and Breitbart. His rendition, which is supposed to be something of a stand-up comedy routine, was mainly old jokes thrown awkwardly to intersect with nationalist themes. He started his speech with the “unveiled” video by Alt Right parody artist UnCuck the Right called “We Didn’t Start the Movement,” which is a cheesy song naming different right wing allies and has Jared Taylor in a brimmed hat and Hawaiian shirt singing along out of key. At the end of Paul’s speech they played an even more embarrassing video, “Dildoween,” which was a voiced over parody of the opening song in The Nightmare Before Christmas. This was even more embarrassing than the first, mainly just mashing together slang from the Daily Shoah into a barely rhyming string of insults and racial slurs. This was a low point even for AmRen, which they have always attempted to brand as an intellectual gathering rather than just an attempt for Nazis and Klansman to wear a bow tie.
Anke van Dermeesh
Going Euro
Anke van Dermeesh, a Belgian nationalist Senator, came mainly to talk about the “perils” of Muslim immigration and her work doing Islamophobic organizing in Europe. She claimed that “third world immigration” was a battle for the very soul of Europe, comparable to the Greek battle against the Troy invaders. It was Europe’s own materialism and individualism, however, which made it vulnerable, so Europeans needed to reclaim their racial spirit. Her organization, Women Against Islam, is ugly enough on its own, but what is even more frightening is that she has held several major elected offices in Belgium.
The multicultural ideology assumes that different civilization levels can live peacefully with each other on the same territory. However, history has already proven that this leads to bloody clashes. After which one culture, the dominant culture, gets the upper hand over the weakest. Pointing out historical facts, and referring to the theory, like the one of Charles Darwin, is an act of racism in Europe….The multicultural society will never exist. Many human lives have already been destroyed and still people’s races, civilizations, and cultures collide.
Van Dermesh mentions the American cities where she says that these clashes are still happening, where black people with their “lower level” of civilization cannot handle sophisticated white societies. She said that regular “folk” identity has been criminalized, and that the influx of immigrants are undermining a sense of identity, authority, law, order, and moral astuteness that will lead to degeneracy of their great European people. While she attempts to throw these ideas into abstractions, they are the same ideological core that you would find with hard-core neo-Nazi organizations around Europe. Her ideas indicate the notion that there is an essential racial soul to whites that is being destroyed by modern science and logic, and that we need to attack rationality, give in to violent reactions to the “other,” and try to reinstate an anti-democratic order of racial supremacy.
Ruuben Kaalep
Ruuben Kaalep brought a similarly international experience from the Conservative Party of Estonia, a country from which AmRen enjoys pulling its racialists. At only 22, he is a leader in the six-year-old party that is making nationalism a major player in Estonian party politics. Kaalpe seemed to be even radical by their standards, and talked about bringing Europeans, and Estonians specifically, back to their “12,000 years of roots.” Kaalep could not explain these ideas in genetic terms since there is no coherent genetic history that Estonians can trace back 12,000 years as specific people because that is not not how genetic histories work, nor do isolated genes have any real influence on the development of culture. Nationalism is a social construct, not an idea embedded in biology, so the call to the past 12,000 years is just as arbitrary as going back to the reformation or the French Revolution. Neither one brings that back to an era of racial identity and purity because that period did not exist in history. Likewise, most of the AmRen speakers likely would not have joined in with Kaalep’s Estonian nationalism since they prefer a pan-European white nationalism. While the statements are not based in research, science, or historical facts, it does make good rhetoric for a crowd looking to class up their racist impulses.
On the evening plenary before AmRen, Red Ice Radio asked Kaalep what he was going to be talking about at the conference.
I will encourage the young people in America to start a movement, and to act against what they see is happening around the world in white countries. To do it just as we have done it in Estonia with our youth movement. Because it is very important, even as human beings it is very important that we have an identity. A living identity that connects us with the people around us and the places that we live.
This was Kaalep’s first time out of Europe, and he said that it was a culture shock since he was coming from “Europe’s last white country.” He spent some time bragging about how many blondes there were in Estonia.
Filip Dewinter also spoke about his position in the European Parliament for the Vlaams Belang, and did the standard speech about non-white immigration and its threat to a white Europe.
Jared Taylor
Benediction for Racists
Jared Taylor always speaks at American Renaissance, and this year was no exception. His talk was intended to be on why progressive whites “lie,” to themselves and to others, and he goes down the line: they lie about Black victimization by police, lie about the science proving black intellectual inferiority, and lie about race and crime. He tapped into well-known Alt Right talking points, rehashing the Cologne attacks, which the far right tries to use to “prove” that Islamic refugees are systemically raping white European women. Their idea is then that political correctness is a “religion” so powerful that it makes authorities neglect rape and violence so as to not be called racist. Never mind that the statistics do not support what he says, nor was the Cologne attacks universally Muslim refugees. There is no statistical threat of sexual assault posed uniquely by Muslim immigration, but Taylor’s entire purpose is to twist statistics to drum up a fear narrative. With the same aristocratic drawl that has become a meme on the Alt Right, Jared Taylor states that the “ludicrous” notion of racial equality has no real world basis.
During his Question and Answers section he is asked about the Jews, and he convenes to the idea that some “elite Jews” have been very “destructive” to their interests. He then points out that many Jews have been on the nationalist side of the argument, but that racialists should “have their eyes open” about the Jews. He says that the Jews may have been the “hand pushing at the door” of the ‘Death of the West,’ but “that door was rotting from within” already.
This really marks a change for Jared Taylor on the Jewish Question as he used to be vigorously opposed to anti-Semitism at AmRen. Not only were there Jewish scholars at AmRen conferences like Byron Roth, even David Duke was asked not to return to the conference because of his rabid anti-Semitism. While Taylor was not willing to go fully into blaming Jewish people, he certainly did not admonish anti-Semitism, and seems to be warming up to these ideas. This also shows the persistence that anti-Semitism has had on the Alt Right/New Right and the fact that it is going to continue to play a major role in American racialism.
Sam Dickson
Sam Dickson did his regular “Benediction for Heretics,” which is often a rambling set of remembrances and accolades to racists of the past. As usual, Dickson tempered his language and used a sort of “liberals are the real racist” argument to say that people who do not want racial separation are actually manipulating people of color and attempting to “solve the problem of black people.” For someone who does not immediately appear as being particularly sophisticated, his use of left-wing rhetoric and warm personalities is masterful, which is probably why he has continued to be a staple of the Alt Right while many of the Southern racist organizations have drifted into irrelevance.
Dickson carried on the theme that the left and the media lie about them to put the racist movement in disfavor, mentioning the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on Dickson that he characterized as saying he was a “financial swindler.” The story, which has been well sourced and proven, shows that Dickson makes his money by manipulating poor homeowners in the South through predatory property purchases.
Since 2001, Dickson, a 59-year-old former Klan attorney and active veteran of numerous extreme-right causes and groups, has built a multi-million dollar business in the niche field of tax lien and title acquisition. His success has depended in no small part on keeping his otherwise well-known racism concealed from his targets, many of which are poor and black. According to those who have observed and worked with Dickson, his profits have been earned through a combination of bullying, stealth, and legal pretzel-making in the arcane world of tax lien purchases, redemptions and foreclosures. When contacted, Dickson declined to comment on the charges.
Many in the story mentioned how Dickson was casually racist, often saying that people on the phone couldn’t be black because they were “too smart” to have that skin tone. Dickson, of course, takes issue with this characterization of him as a predator and low-class racist, especially since he likes to call himself an Identitarian and says that he has the best interests of people of color at heart. Though Dickson went on and on about sacrifice, he has become a millionaire despite being in the racialist movement for almost 50 years.
Dickson recommended that the young racists in the crowd get themselves some degree of financial stability since the “struggle”(their racist struggle) is ongoing, and will not just be victorious with the election of Donald Trump. While he seemed optimistic by the billionaire buffoon’s casual racism, he is still one of the strongest voices against investing in reformist political moves. A couple of years ago, Richard Spencer and Dickson debated John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow about the possibilities of reform. Brimelow and Derbyshire discussed how they thought that the American political system could be used, even though unlikely, to “fix the race problem.” Spencer and Dickson took the more radical view that America was beyond fixing, largely because it is still an enlightenment, propositional project that has invested in phrases like “all men are created equal.” Dickson was brash in the past, saying, “no man, in the history of the world, was created equal.”
One of the more “unofficial personalities” of AmRen 2016 was Richard Spencer, who could not help but pontificate on the microphone during Question and Answer sessions. Spencer has often been the debatable leader of the intellectual wing of the Alt Right, defining the term itself and bringing together disparate elements of the far right into an intellectual current to build a movement on traditionalist, racialist, and hierarchical lines. Spencer has often been a divisive figure, often finding opponents inside of religious and working-class racist circles. This was made clear when he banned Trad Youth’s Matt Heimbach from NPI’s 2015 conference for his homophobia, which Spencer is offended by because it would leave out masculanist writers like Jack Donovan.
Spencer’s presence was heavy this year as he holds onto the growing Alt Right, and this comes, in part, because he was able to reconcile the intellectual elitism of his publication and non-profit with the vulgar racist populism of places like the Daily Shoah and Fash the Nation. This has given him a new life, and one where he is able to maintain his crown as an aristocrat of racialist philosophy and pseudo-science.
Patting Themselves on the Back
Jared Taylor has declared that this AmRen conference was their largest effort, which he attributes to Donald Trump and the wave of Internet followers.
There is no doubt that Donald Trump’s candidacy has given our movement a boost, but the continuing slide towards chaos–riots in Ferguson and Baltimore; the immigration invasion of Europe–are rousing unprecedented numbers of whites from complacency.
Red Ice Radio’s Lana and Henrik interview Jared Taylor in a streaming broadcast.
Both the Political Cesspool and Red Ice Radio made AmRen a streaming media event as well, which helps to circle their own internal media landscape around AmRen as a centerpiece. Nathan Damigo of Identity Europa was Red Ice’s first guest, where he basically acted starstruck by all the celebrity racists and discussed campus activism. A Pakistani-American engineer, a bi-racial man who identified as a “racial realist”, followed him up. He went on about how Pakistanis could do better to maintain their nation’s IQ by avoiding cousin marriage and irrigating water better. He explained race realism in much the same way J. Philippe Rushton did, that white people evolved in “harsher” conditions in Europe, giving them a higher IQ. He basically provided a “we’re different, so what?” perspective, but said that IQ was the important thing and that society needed to stop subsidizing low IQ people or civilization will die. This was an interesting development for a conference like AmRen, but it also shows how HBD and neo-eugenic rhetoric has worked its way into Asian and Middle Eastern communities online as well.
Counter-Currents Publishing, the neo-fascist publishing house from the infamous Greg Johnson, covered the conference in a review from Michael Polignano. He noted the “celebratory mood” in the room and the several “Make America Great Again” hats dotted around the tables. He also noted the “diversity” and young age of the attendants, which is new for a white nationalist movement that was almost universally composed of older white men. As he went down the line he seemed especially drawn to Dan Roodt’s speech, and South Africa is always a topical favorite for this crowd since they have so well embedded the lie of “white genocide” in the country that they use it repeatedly as an example of “what happens” when white relinquish hegemonic control over a country.
Since African IQ is insufficiently high to sustain the civilization that Afrikaners built from scratch and sustained for centuries up until the end of the apartheid era, Pakistanis and Chinese have raced to filled many positions of power and responsibility held by whites. What can be done? In the short run, all white South Africans can do is either flee or try to hold on. to(sic) survive, they need to increase their physical and economic security. Physical security measures include bodyguards, security guards, and private police, neighborhood crime watches and increasing ownership. Economic security measures include networking and mutual aid to keep wealth within the pro-white segment of the white South African community.
South Africa has long been a centerpiece of the “white genocide” narrative, where the rural “farm murders” has given them a rhetorical strategy for conjuring up images of racial revenge. In reality, the rural Boer murders that they cite are statistically lower than the regular murders in South Africa broadly, and are much more a testament to the brutality with which wealthy farm owners have historically treated their farm hands with.
In general, Polignano said that the conference was a “triumph,” that showed the future of the movement. What he still does not seem to grasp is what a “movement” actually means, and what is to happen when they come to grips with the fact that they are vastly outmatched by the anti-fascist left and that they have no concept of what real organizing actually means.
Photo from inside AmRen
Anti-Fascism Has Localized
AmRen has always been a strategic meeting point for the racialist movement, and generally has been in a state of flux. When their movement moves towards HBD, it shifts its speakers. When it is looking towards electrical politics, it brings in political nationalists from Europe. What it has always acted as is more of a meeting point than anything else, and while this is larger than in years past, it is also made up of people less willing to be open about their politics. This means that simply by shining a light on who these people are and the reality of what they are saying, we can help to challenge any growth they will have.
There was an organized Antifa presence this year, as there always has been, yet much of the energy has grown locally as organizers challenge Donald Trump appearances instead of focusing on conferences like AmRen. This is a good sign as anti-fascism is becoming a strategic orientation for community defense, and just as Donald Trump has emboldened the Alt Right, it has made anti-fascist organizers a central piece of building intersecting local movements.
The white nationalists in the U.S. need AmRen because they lack the fellowship and community that the left has always built, and they will continue to lack coordination and organizing ability as their focus will always be on their racial idealism. Why they congratulate themselves under the protection of U.S. state authorities, we are building a movement against the rising tide of nationalism.
For all its claims of discernment and elitism, the Alt Right will take just about anyone it can get.
We have covered the infamous D-list reality celebrity Tila Tequila in the past. Several years ago, Tequila seemed to go off the deep end on her own website where she started posting Holocaust Denial rants, admiration for Hitler, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories claiming that the Jews of today are actually the parasitic Khazar race and not the Israelites of the Bible. This is one of the more “out there” conspiratorial claims usually made by Christian Identity extremists, and for some reason this bi-sexual Asian woman is now allying herself with the furthest reaches of Nazism.
Her strange love for Hitler has garnered the most attention, with her beginning by posting a picture of herself dressed as a Nazi. She has posted articles and comments discussing her celebration of Hitler, and as recent as Hitler’s birthday (4/20) this year(2016) she went to Twitter to say that Hitler was the “true king,” her soul mate, that he was the second coming of Christ, and that she was Hitler in a past life. She went as far as to Photoshop herself into a picture sitting next to Hitler.
In the past she turned her own personal website into a troll farm for far-right Jew bashing, where any criticism was met with the vilest racial slurs straight out of Stormfront. An example of this would be what she said of reality TV director James Marcus Howe, where she hurled the kind of insults you never would have expected.
GOD SEE’S(sic) YOU DIRTY FUCKING KIKES WORKING FOR THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN AND I HAVE RETURNED AS HIS MESSENGER! TAKE HEED NOW BITCHES!
She often responded by calling people Jews and Kikes when commenters said she was being racist or attempted to point out that Hitler would admonish her for her bi-racial background. She was eventually dropped from the reality show Big Brother in 2015 because of her pro-Hitler politics.
Over the years it has not gotten much better for Tequila as she desperately raises money online to pay rent and takes almost any appearance job she can get. She came back into the news recently as she went on Twitter to say she also does not believe the earth is round, and that she joined rapper B.O.B. in calling NASA “globalist shills.” The idea here is that NASA are a part of the anti-nationalist “new world order” that is destroying our racial and cultural identities with lies like the spherical Earth. She has also roundly endorsed Donald Trump, which is an endorsement even the Trump campaign was not likely looking for.
Her anti-black racism has also garnered gossip recently as she continues to go on Twitter and say vulgar racist things about black people. She has said that “blacks” pray to their “fried chicken God,” that the “coloreds” shop at Wal-Mart, and various other mockeries of having “affirmative action friends.” It didn’t help when Radar Online revealed a text message she sent to the father of her child that read “Your daughter Briana is dating a n***er…why is this so prevalent in your family?” She spends much of her time on Twitter tweeting at black artists asking why she isn’t allowed to use the N-word.
In an effort to one up herself, she has now appeared on one of the most popular white nationalist podcasts in the world. Fash the Nation is the political podcast from The Right Stuff, the parent website of the Daily Shoah podcast. It has now eclipsed the Daily Shoah in popularity, mainly because it spends three hours pretending they have a good grasp on American politics. The podcast mainly discusses Donald Trump’s candidacy, but the hosts usually devolve into racist name calling and Trump worship, and it is clear that they are out of their league when it comes to even the most basic political analysis.
They occasionally have guests, and even an interview once in a while, and that is where Tila Tequila came in.
Many people might say that she would not know exactly what Fash the Nation was exactly, but right from the start it became clear that she not only knew what it and the Alt Right were, but she was also sympathetic. While she labeled herself as Conservative, she said she was moving in the direct of the Alt Right. She said that she was previously unaware of what was “really going on,” and then left Hollywood for Texas and began “trolling” online with conspiracy theorists. She met Alt Right people online and then found that her community in Houston were reflecting what Alt Righters said, where non-white immigration had turned her neighborhood into an “unsafe ghetto.”
It seriously looks like a third world country out here. And its not fair because my parents actually worked really hard to become, you know, middle class people…crime has really shot up, and it has turned really ghetto. I can’t even take my daughter out anywhere without worry about, and then I have to think about, ‘ok, what areas can I migrate to to take her to a safer area.’ We shouldn’t be kicked out of our neighborhoods.
They avoided the fact that she was from an immigrant family, just like the immigrants she was blaming. In reality, crime has not risen dramatically in the immigrant areas of Houston and the increases in crime rate that do happen are directly correlative to income inequality.
Tila quickly, and on her own, began moving into the Alt Right’s narrative about public housing vouchers and how the government is actually destroying white neighborhoods by “moving in” poor people of color. She agreed that people of color shouldn’t be moved into white neighborhoods because they would destroy them.
It’s like they have taken Section 8 housing people and spread them into nice neighborhoods, to be equal, or whatever. And its not cool because, sure, everyone deserves a chance to have a good life, or whatever, but its just not safe to mix certain types of—
She stopped herself in the middle of saying Mexican, which is again, strange given her own non-white ethnic background. She repeatedly talked about how she was often the only “light skinned” person in these dangerous neighborhoods, and how she worries for her daughter’s safety anytime she was near dark skinned members of the community. Most of this came with stuttering rants, barely coherent in their embarrassing fragments. For an Alt Right community that celebrates elitism, this has to be the bottom of their own barrel.
They spent a great deal of time talking Donald Trump, where she supported the candidate’s plan to build a wall since “there are a bunch of invaders coming into our country.” Her and the Fash the Nation hosts discussed the allyship between whites and Asians, who white nationalists often consider to be “second to whites” because of a perceived high natural intelligence. They still say they don’t want a great deal of Asian immigration, which Tila agrees, saying “we didn’t come over here [to the U.S.] to bring the third world with us.” The hosts do their best to keep Tila on their racist track, moving to international refugee policy.
While it may seem confusing for a neo-fascist podcast like Fash the Nation to have someone like Tila Tequila as a guest, especially since she is non-white, non-heterosexual, and having worked as a sex worker, it is part of their program. What it shows more than anything is that these ideas are not just isolated t0 a white core, but can have allies throughout the culture. It also shows the willingness by people on the Alt Right to pull any celebrity in that could possibly connect to their racialism, even if they are barely literate reality stars who think the Earth is flat.
Note: It should be noted clearly that we think there is nothing shameful about sex work, and believe that it is both “real work” and something that should be respected and defended. The irony, however, is that those at The Right Stuff, the Daily Shoah, and Fash the Nation do not agree, and instead see sex work as decadent degeneracy.
Anything associated with the Alt Right and popular blogs and podcasts of their ilk, such as the Daily Stormer or the Daily Shoah, seem to have a short shelf life in the non-racist world.
As we have reported on in the past, at length, the Daily Shoah and the Right Stuff have contributed quite a bit to neo-fascism and white nationalism in terms of language. They have created dozens, if not hundreds, of slang terms and memes for the far right, giving them their own internal language.
One of their favorites of these is the “echo.” Like most white nationalists and neo-Nazis, the Alt Right is incredibly anti-Semitic. Drawing on the work of people like Kevin McDonald, they see Jews as being in a struggle of ethnic conflict inside of their “host” societies in Western nations. Jews then create “pseudoscientific” ideas like Freudianism, Marxism, capitalism, etc, all to destabilize the rightful ethnic nationalism of white Europeans. If they do this, so their conspiracy theory goes, Jews can then outcompete Europeans for resources, then dominating institutions like investment banks and the media.
For this reason they say that Jewish last names “echo” through history and important institutions, and they try to prove this Jewish conspiracy by pointing out Jewish, or Jewish sounding, last names of people in positions of political or social power. None of this actually explains how Jews do this, how all of these political and social systems are false and traced back to Jewish ethnic interests, or how Jews know how to fall in line with this grand conspiracy by virtue of a few shared genes.
Never the less, they, like most on the far right, prove their accusation simply by pointing at anything they do not like and finding Jewish last names associated with it. Immigration, “cultural Marxism,” free market politics, pedophilia, pornography, feminism, and just about all other “degeneracies” that have no connection to each other are put under this umbrella.
The symbols they are using in text for these echoes are a parenthesis on each side, for example: (((name))). This is to say the name “echoes,” and it has been an inside joke for almost a year now on racist Twitter and Facebook. Because it is not as well known as other words of racial abuse, it does not get flagged easily on social media.
A Daily Shoah affiliate even created a Google Chrome extension that puts the echoes on Jewish last names automatically, and will crash your browser if you go to the Wikipedia page for neoconservatism because of the number of Jewish names. The extension was named the Coincidence Detector, another inside joke saying, “Look at all the Jewish names, must be a “coincidence.”
The Right Stuff was obviously angry about it being pulled, so then they released their own new shirts featuring the (((Coincidence))). They are selling these over at Tee Spring, where they also had their Standard Pool Company and Fash the Nation shirts for sale. It won’t be long before pressure if put on Tee Spring and those shirts are taken down as well.
They also put up an article called “How to Spot a Jew in a World Without a Coincidence Detector,” which basically tells you what a Jewish name might look.
The most obvious clues the books details are Jewish names. One of the most obvious ways to identify a Jewish name is to take note of the suffix, the most famous suffix in the West being (((((((-BURG))))))). You can mishmash anything in front of it, but usually if there is a (((-burg))) at the end of a last name you know you are dealing with a Jew. Here is a short list of Jewish suffixes to watch out for. Remember this is only a clue to one’s heritage; there is a small chance this might be a goy.
-burg or -berg
-stein
-blatt
-man
-mann
And remember these names can be mish mashed together. You can have Steinburgs, Burgsteins or even Steinmanns. There are also the more popular Jewish family names that don’t use an identifiable suffix or even a set spelling. Names like:
-S(c)hapiro (sometimes spelled different from LITTLE BENJI)
-Cohen
-Katz
-Kaplan
All of these names echo and can help you build your 5th-generation Jewdar. But are there any other ways to identify Jews than just their names?
This is about the extent of their deep thinking about the Jewish Question(or the JQ as they call it), and it is worthwhile to continue to point out that their “grand theory” about Jewish “influence” is just gutteral anti-Semitism couched in fancy sounding words.
The Omaha, Nebraska Police Department has decided to follow the lead of other reactionary departments around the country in pursuing protesters who confronted the fascist Donald Trump campaign in recent weeks. On May 6th, there were three key arrests of protesters who were challenging the quick appearance by Donald Trump before he made his way to Eugene, Oregon. While the Trump campaign supporters shuffled into the venue they hurled racial epithets at the protesters of color, and when the police came in they decided to go after the people of color while leaving their white comrades untouched.
As the Unified for Our Rights campaign says, which was created to confront the attack on the protester’s right to confront oppression, this is a matter of free speech as much as anything.
Just a few days ago, the Omaha Police Officers Association (OPOA) released a letter in regards to the “Omaha Eppley Three” arrests.
FYI – “Omaha Eppley Three” is the arrests that were made during the Trump Rally/Protest on May 6th. These 3 black activists were arrested while our fellow white activists were given a chance to stand down. The trump supporters were allowed to spit on and shove protestors while using racial slurs.
The OPOA specifically named Tan Oliver and is threatening to pursue legal actions against her and anyone who supports her.
This is a threat to our FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!
“To suppress freedom of speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker”
– Frederick Douglass
We will not continue to go unaware, unheard and underestimated. We need to make it known that we will not sit down and shut up.
The march is going to be going from the Gene Leahy Mall on the Douglas St. side and then march to the Police Station on this Saturday, June 4th.
As Donald Trump does a victory lap as he takes the Republican nomination for President, the movement against his populist nationalist rhetoric has been increasing in intensity. The recent stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico saw people flooding the street looking to shut down the event just like they did in Chicago and promised to in Vancouver.
During the action there were four arrests, and the organizers are continuing the work by doing court support and fundraising for those who put themselves on the line. According to the fundraiser, the Albuquerque Police Department is trying to go after an additional thirty protesters who they are labeling with dog-whistle language like “thugs.”
On Tuesday, May 24, 2016, hundreds took to the street to reject Trump’s racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. Albuquerque residents used a diversity of tactics to make their voices heard, ranging from holding signs and chanting to throwing rocks at the cops defending the Trump rally and attacking protesters.
4 people were arrested during the protests: 2 adults and 2 minors. In the aftermath, APD is attempting to track down 30 “thugs” the department claims committed crimes on May 24. They released photos of suspects, targeting and profiling Latino youth. APD says they are waiting until they have built air-tight cases to begin their arrests, so we don’t know who or how many people will be arrested.
The money we raise will be used for legal expenses for anyone charged at the Trump protest in Albuquerque. As this unfolds, we need to be prepared to provide money for bail, legal fees, and if possible, legal representation.
Donald Trump joined in with the Albuquerque Police Department in calling the protesters thugs, and honed in on the fact that Mexican flags were present. This is intended to signal to his base that the protesters were “not one of us” and have an “allegiance to Mexico,” which will play into the right-wing narrative that Mexicans are “colonizing” the American Southwest.
The police treated the protesters with violence, using smoke grenades against the crowd. They said that this was in response to rocks, plastic bottles, and burning t-shirts being thrown at officers. Several protesters were able to get inside with banners reading things like “We’ve heard enough” and “Trump is a Fascist.” Some of the 4,000 Trump supporters chanted back “Build the Wall!” in response. At the end of the event, the convention center had its glass doors smashed and Trump’s speech disrupted.
They need donations to go directly to those who need legal support and are facing legal charges due to protest actions. Though there are four in custody, the Albuquerque Police Department is committed to going after other people in the region.
The internet erupted when a video came to light of an angry street preacher standing in front of a Phoenix high school with a sandwich board sign that said “You Deserve Rape.” The video, taken by the preacher himself, showed him yelling at students with aggressive homophobic, sexist, and violent rhetoric. Several people came up to him to ask him to leave, yet eventually someone had enough and hit him in the head with a baseball bat. The video shows the preacher, named Brother Dean Saxton, walking away defeated and bleeding.
A fundraiser was created by Phoenix Anarchist Black Cross to support the woman that was charged with the assault on Saxton, which is intended to fund her getting adequate legal support so she can get a fair hearing. Saxton has been harassing young women around Phoenix for years, and even if people do not condone violence like this it is easy to understand how his behavior could be triggering to survivors of sexual assault.
Whenever a large racist skinhead show makes its way to town it leaves a disastrous trail in its wake.
As many of you have been watching, NYC Antifa and antifascists from around the country have been raising the profile of the neo-Nazi Oi!Fest 2016 concert coming to New York City. Oxblood, Offensive Weapon, Battle Zone, Close Shave and others fill out a line-up that has become the edge of the “white noise” music scene.
The show was originally booked at the Black Bear Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This was not overly surprising as the bar had been a venue to the controversial Operation Equinox tour from the nationalist post-industrial website Heathen Harvest. Though the racist side of neofolk is often less known to venues, antifascists called in and made it incredibly clear what Heathen Harvest was promoting and the problematic behavior of several of the bands on the bill, including Blood and Sun.
This time the show was less ambiguous, and made up of a more working-class fascist contingent rather than the esoteric mysticism of the neofolk crowd.
After the announcement came in, people went to their social media and called in to share their disappointment with Black Bear once again siding with Nazis. This time Black Bear Bar eventually caved in and canceled the show. They quickly put up an apology, backtracking for their booking.
It is with deep remorse, shared by all members of the BlackBear Bar team that we write this statement expressing our apologies to our neighbors, customers, patrons, friends and the artistic community for our part in the Oi fest, which was scheduled at BlackBear this past weekend. We have decided to cancel the remainder of this event and sincerely regret our negligence in allowing this to happen
To best grasp how this happened, it’s important to understand the nuance of the day-to-day operations of a music venue. There are a number of team members, both internal and external, which allow us to provide quality programming seven days a week. This community includes a number of outside promoters. Many of these promoters are folks with whom we have worked for a number of years and built strong, trusting relationships with.
One of these promoters brought us this event, with a short list of bands who would take part in the weekend, including Oxblood as a headliner, who did meet our booking standards. It wasn’t until much later, and after much assurance to the contrary, that the problematic nature of this event was brought to our attention. Obviously we should have and take full responsibility for the lack of oversight.
We acted as fast as we could and have cancelled the duration of the program. We have made it clear to the parties involved that we want absolutely no part in the values represented by and through this event.
As one of the last independently owned and operated creative spaces in Williamsburg, Black Bear has hosted all forms of diverse creative expression, from GLBTQ parties, Latino, Asian, hip hop, R ‘N B, Burlesque, performance art, progressive political events, and community outreach initiatives. For that we take full responsibility and would like to extend our sincere apologies to the community for our negligence. We can assure you all that this incident has been eye opening to us, and forced us to readjust our booking procedures. We will continue to host events that meet our highest standards and promote tolerance and inclusiveness in all forms.
While Black Bear was the venue, the promoter, a man named Curtis, was who brought it to them. He later issued another statement trying to defend against the growing backlash.
The purpose of this letter is to sincerely apologize to Black Bear Bar, New Island Presents and our community for my part in renting Black Bear Bar to promoters for May 28ths shows. As a venue finder, I occasionally work with these entities to book various shows with promoters looking for venues, which is the case here. Unfortunately we did not properly screen this event.
Let’s be clear, neither the venue nor I have any association with this group of people outside of allowing someone looking to rent or(sic) venue without thoroughly enough screening the show. Neither the venue nor myself had any involvement in booking or promoting and of the bands for this night.
While we had no behavior issues of any sort at this event, it becomes apparent that their(sic) are underlying political tones to the genre that can be very offensive. The show was explained to us as a punk rock show and underlying details were obscured. We missed the mark.
I would encourage members of our community to not lay blame to the venue for said show as they always (sic) professional, considerate and host to a huge variety of wholesome music. Once again, I sincerely apologize for my role in this event and hope our community can allow us some understanding and forgive.
While Black Bear did host the first night of the show, they canceled the second night leaving Oi!Fest without a venue. That is when they went to the Santos Party House, a club that is co-owned by Andrew WK and the rapper Despot (among several others). Antifascist organizers reached out to Andrew WK and Despot via social media to ask them why their venue would host such an event. While Andrew WK remained silent, Despot was angered by the insinuation that he had anything to do with it and lashed out. Santos even bent over backwards to host the neo-Nazis and canceled the band Emergency Protocol’s show to clear the venue.
Someone known as New York Year Zero on Twitter came out to the venue to see exactly what type of people were at this show. His photos reveal pretty clearly that this was a group closely allied with neo-Nazi street scenes from the U.S. and Europe, and claims that it was a non-racist skinhead were false.
Skinheads at the show were reportedly Seig Heiling even though they were asked by promoters not to because it ends up as photographic evidence. The code-word they use to refer to this is “waving to Kyle.”
Things were apparently not doing well for the Santos Party House as they closed down the day after Oi!Fest, even though there were still dates booked later into the summer.
The bands in question have remained relatively silent throughout the affair, with only Oxblood going to their Facebook page to post a picture from the first night filled with angry skinheads moshing. The most popular (by Nazi standards) bands on the bill have tried their best to avoid clear associations with their Nazi roots, but those connections are clear when their rhetoric is stripped away.
Paul Dirk, a member of Close Shave, also played for neo-Nazi bands like Razors Edge and English Rose who released albums on well-known Nazi labels like Dim Records. They are known for other acts like Panzerknacker, Ultima Thule, Combat 84, and Celtic Warrior.
Close Shave
As Anti-Fascists Online reported, Close Shave has tried to become a more mainstream Oi! band by hiding their Nazi roots.
Like many other far right bands they try to hide the fact in public and go to great lengths to deny it but the proof is in the pudding as they are still writing right wing lyrics to their most recent songs.
They have played with many of the notorious White Power bands in Britain such as the gigs they did in 1989 – May 6th in Loughborough with Violent Storm, English Rose, Skullhead and Guttersnipe Army, May 13th in Consett with Skullhead, and another in Consett on October 28th with Skullhead and Brutal Attack. Not to mention a more recent gig with American boneheads Brassic.
They’ve also played support to Skrewdriver during Skrewdriver’s nazi period. In fact over the years Close Shave have played with almost every Nazi / RAC band doing the rounds. They even name check Skullhead on one of their Link Records releases.
In 1993 Close Shave played a gig in Germany with nazi band Razors Edge and a few others. That gig was recently released on DVD. The cover shows white Skinheads attacking black people.
Close Shave still regularly play with extremist right wing bands and RAC bands.
Every year in Blackpool there’s a “secret” gig for fascist bands who aren’t welcome at the Rebellion festival. Close Shave is regularly part of that line-up. Not only does the band play, but it have they also played a part in organizing it.
Offensive Weapon has followed Close Shave’s lead in attempting to create a complicated smokescreen that provides some level of cover for their politics and history. They have released an album with the openly neo-Nazi record label Pure Impact, and the lead singer often wears an “Anti ANTIFA” shirt that is popular among the Nazi subculture. They attempt to describe themselves just as “patriotic,” but when their lyrics and relationships are put on the table, it ends up just being a cowardly attempt at avoiding their associations.
Battle Zone has a more obvious history, as they were a staple in the British neo-Nazi skinhead scene until their first break-up in 1994. The lead singer, Alex Ellui, moved to Peru from England after pressure from his “comrades” in Combat 18. They have tried to be “non-political” since then, but that is merely a way of avoiding the complications that racist organizing brought them in the past. While they try to avoid explicit politics in their lyrics, they continue to tour with bands that do and keep the racist skinhead scene close to their heart. They even get nostalgic on occasion and bring back earlier racialist lyrics in their songs and join in at Rock Against Communism events.
While many of the bands try to hide behind relationships with nationalists of color, their crews and goals are obvious. What is even clearer is that the community around them is not going to tolerate their attempt at holding public events. Not only were antifascist organizers ready when Oi!Fest began in NYC, but the rest of community revolted against the venues that were bold enough to host them. The response from the Black Bear Bar is a good sign that bands like this will be hitting the black list, and that anti-racist values are being set as a standard for music and art venues in the city.
This should also send a message to non-racist Oi! bands to make sure an avoid the racist side as it looks like shows like Oi!Fest are intended to appeal to the non-political Trojan skinhead crowd as well.
Feeling the force of antifascist pressure from NYC Antifa and others, the Black Bear Bar in Brooklyn finally decided to cancel the Oi!Fest 2016 skinhead concert they were hosting. The bar had provided cover to the neo-Nazis organizing the concert, just as they did previously by supporting the neofolk Operation Equinox tour, using the few multi-racial members of the skinhead bands as a cover. As people have noticed, this group of nationalist skinheads have reached out to nationalists of color to create a more “multi-racial” fascist subculture, and one that often confuses those looking for traditional racial separatism.
It was this multiracial character that Black Bear used to defend themselves as antifascists descended on their social media. On Facebook, they spent all evening defending themselves against allegations of aiding Nazi gangs. People from around the country, but especially New York, posted on there, sharing stories of Black Bear regularly supporting “Rock Against Communism” shows and using traditional Nazi insignia in the bar. The bar repeatedly tried to point to Asian and Latin American members of some of the bands as proof that this was a non-racist skinhead show, yet members of the community immediately posted information about neo-Nazism in Latin and Asian communities that they were attempting to create alliances with.
In a recent article, the Southern Poverty Law Center took a special look at the inclusion of people of color in this otherwise racialist scene . They pointed out that many of these street fascist movements, which this brand of skinheads inhabit in the United States, have had several attempts to “rebrand” themselves using a tenuous multi-racial alliance.
From the 1980s to the mid-2000s, the dominant brand within the far-right sector of skinhead subculture was neo-nazism, and such interracial co-mingling would have been unthinkable. In truth, there have always been skinheads of varying degrees of “whiteness” across the world who have sought to uphold strains of far-right politics.
A prime example of how race is falling away as the dominant organizer within the extremist skinhead music scene occurred in 2013.
Bound For Glory, one the first neo-nazi skinhead bands to emerge here, toured Japan with Aggro Knuckle, one of that country’s oldest skinhead bands. The two also released a split-record together. In that way, NYC Oi! Fest is an important microcosm of the landscape of “hate music” worldwide. Last year’s installment brought bands to New York City from as far away as Finland and Mexico.
“Oi,” after all, encapsulates a broad range of skinhead-oriented punk and rock ‘n’ roll. Most Oi! fests and concerts book bands who offer little-to-no political overtones or messages. Their songs and the shows themselves often revolve around drinking and other subcultural markers, like banal expressions of patriotism. By inserting “Oi!” into its title, the fest’s promotors –– Dennis Davila of United Riot Records chief among them –– are putting forth their version of what skinhead identity and music should exist as, while directing hostility towards outsider and those they “other.”
There is, of course, historical precedent for this. Efforts to reframe skinhead identity and music were first undertaken by the neo-Nazi political party National Front in England in the early 1980s. The efforts of those organizing NYC Oi! Fest –– a long-standing crew calling itself the 211 Bootboys, of which Davilia is a member –– aren’t wholly dissimilar from the National Front’s attempts to attract skinheads to their worldview.
They go on to outline the violent homophobic and nationalist lyrics of bands in the Oi!Fest line-up, including Brassic. They have allowed Nazi skinhead crews to make Oi!Fest an annual meet-up point, and bands like Brassic have had explicit Nazis set up their shows around Europe.
Anti-fascist writer Spencer Sunshine outlines the complicated nature of these seeming “multi-racial” alliances that we are seeing in this skinhead event, as well as in circles like National Anarchism and radical traditionalist circles.
Today, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan are no longer the only groups that endorse White separatism. This is partly due to the secessionist fever that has spread across the U.S. Right, uniting Right Libertarians, conspiracy theorists, Christian theocrats, Sovereign Citizens, neo-Confederates, and traditional White separatists. New groups advocate “pan-secessionist” ideology, and seek to unite the right-wing secessionists with those traditionally closer to the Left, like (bio)regional separatism in Vermont and Cascadia, former Leftist Kirkpatrick Sale’s decentralist Middlebury Institute, and nationalist organizing by those who, in the old anti-imperialist terminology, are “oppressed nations” (Native Americans, African-Americans, Latinos, and other people of color).
However, the most contentious question today is the direct participation of people of color in groups that espouse White separatism as part of their ideology. Loosely organized groups like National-Anarchists, Attack the System, and New Resistance, which actively embrace White separatism as part of their decentralized schema, should be excluded from progressive circles—including people of color who are members of these groups. This also includes members of groups that are multi-racial, but which promote this political view.
In addition to these groups, some people of color are involved in openly fascist circles. Neo-Nazi groups are active in countries such as Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Mongolia, and Malaysia; and members of these movements reportedly have ties in the United States.
In the past, Leftists excluded White people affiliated with groups that espoused White separatism, such as White Aryan Resistance (WAR) and Aryan Nations. But this new secessionism is more complicated; for example, it has led to the spectacle of people of color advocating for the legitimacy of White separatism—by claiming either that all separatism is good separatism, or that a program of complete reciprocal racial separatism requires that all groups have their own geographical enclave.
Cooperation between racial separatists of differing backgrounds is a long-standing tradition. In the 1930s, when Mississippi’s arch-racist Senator Theodore Bilbo publicly called for the expulsion of African-Americans to Africa, members of Marcus Garvey’s movement (themselves proponents of African-American emigration to Africa) approached Bilbo as a potential collaborator. The Nation of Islam (NOI) also has a history of associating with White nationalists, including the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party; Malcolm X cited these associations as one of the reasons he became disgruntled with NOI. WAR’s Tom Metzger has supported and donated money to NOI and has addressed the New Black Panther Party (NBPP). In Florida, one Black separatist organization even held joint demonstrations with a local Klan group.
However, calling for the exclusion of all supporters of White separatism should not be mistaken for a call for progressives to exclude activists who endorse nationalist forms of separatism for people of color, including Black, Native American, or Latino nationalists. It is only the advocacy of White racial separatism that is at issue. While the acceptance of what is called the “right to national self-determination” of racial and ethnic minorities as congruent with larger left-wing goals is not without its critics (including myself), it has a long-established history on the U.S. Left, and its advocates have included the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the Young Lords. However, irrespective of the debates around it, national self-determination by an oppressed group of people is completely different from the “right” of White separatism. White separatism has never had a place in the Left, and its structural function is to reinforce—and not attempt to escape (regardless of whether this would work in practice or not)—existing social hierarchies. In the United States, White people as a group are firmly in control of the majority of economic resources and social power. White separatism is comparable to espousing gated communities for the rich: its purpose is to physically express existing hierarchical social and economic structures.
This type of alliance is something that white nationalists in all circles are going to continue to try and pull from in an attempt to show that “fascism is for everyone.” Even the most recent American Renaissance conference had a Mexican speaker discussing racial nationalism, and they occasionally post that they have Latino participants in their crowd who are there advocating for their own racial separatism. Japanese nationalism, often tied to romantic notions about Imperial Japan and national Shinto, is a special favorite for this crowd, and often is used by white nationalists as proof that they have a coherent ideology that is not just a vessel for angry bigotry. There are very few people of color associating with these white nationalists, but it is a rhetorical strategy that has helped to neutralize opposition who are not aware of these strategic developments on the far-right.
Black Bear eventually went to Twitter to announce that the show for Sunday, May 29th had been canceled.
The show is actually being moved to the Santos Party House, having just been announced at 3:30pm EST. That venue is co-owned by rocker Andrew W. K, who very well may not know what is going on. Fascists are hoping that the antifascist opposition will miss this news, but with a growing contingent in New York City looking to shut it down it will be hard for them to hide. NYC Antifa will be calling for a boycott of Santos Party House if the show is successfully held there.
Contact them and let them know what you think!
SANTOS STAFF:
Chip Su: 212-584-5492, booking@santospartyhouse.com
Bryan: bryan@santospartyhouse.com.
Jackalyn Tipchaieuh: live@santospartyhouse.com (out of the office but send her an email anyway!)
also: info@santospartyhouse.com
FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/santospartyhouse
INSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/santospartyhaus
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